Stories from the set

According to director and screenwriter Byron Howard, in one episode during the festival, 50,000 animals were present on screen at the same time, which became an absolute record in the history of animated films at Disney Studios.

The koala Robert Fervin is named after the voice actor for this character, Robert Clarence Irwin, an Australian conservationist and son of the famous naturalist Steve Irwin (1962-2006).

The goat cops are named Boucheron and Chèvre, voiced by Jean Reno. "Boucheron" is a French semi-soft cheese made from pasteurized goat's milk, and "Chèvre" translates from French as "goat."

The character voiced by Alan Tudyk sells bootleg DVDs, one of which contains a "feral" version of the adventure action film "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom" (Steven Spielberg, 1984), in which Short Round was played by Ke Huy Quan, who voices one of the characters here.

Tom Lister Jr. (who voiced Finnick in the first film of the franchise, released in 2016) passed away in December 2020, before work on the sequel had begun. They did not bring in another actor to voice the character; instead, they used the character's only two lines from the first film and unused lines from Lister Jr.'s voice recordings.

According to producer Yvett Merino, at one point they considered making the new mayor of Zootopia a kangaroo or a giraffe, but the idea was abandoned and the mayor remained a stallion.

In the festival episode, a zebra and a wolf can be seen on screen wearing costumes of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker from the Star Wars franchise.

When two hippo police officers end up at the docks, they are shown eating apples that rolled toward them. This is a reference to the board game Hungry Hungry Hippos, in which hippos eat colorful marbles.

The gazelle voiced by Shakira performs a move against the zebras (voiced by Roman Reigns and Phil Brooks) — a jumping elbow drop onto an opponent — that is used in wrestling, and Reigns and Brooks are professional wrestlers.

The mayor stallion counts down by stamping his hoof. This is a reference to a horse named Clever Hans that actually existed in the early 20th century, who answered arithmetic questions flawlessly by tapping his hoof (it is believed he was simply trained to respond accordingly).